One of the requirements of mobile telecommunication systems is to provide unbroken connections between Base Stations (BSs), also called Evolved Node Bs or eNodeBs or eNBs, and Mobile Stations (MSs) or User Equipment (UE) moving at high speeds. This feature of providing unbroken connections may be accomplished by a serving BS by performing a handover or handoff to another BS. The serving BS decides when to initiate the handover and to which BS the MS needs to be handed over. Typically, the serving BS may handover a MS to a neighbouring BS. In order to determine which of many neighbours to handover a MS, the serving BS may maintain a neighbour list for a MS comprising a listing of signal strength values between the MS and each of the neighbours accessible to the MS. The MS may regularly report the signal strength between itself and each of the neighbours accessible to the MS to the serving BS.
In a sufficiently large network, the list of relevant neighbors for each MS may be large. However, there may be a possibility that some of the neighbors cannot qualify as neighbor candidates as the handover to such neighbors may not have happened for a long period of time and is unlikely to happen in the immediate future. Also, for some of the neighbors, the qualifying potential service level (for example RSRP values, etc.) may be outside acceptable limits. And hence maintaining them as neighbors may not make sense.
Further, measurement of qualifying potential service level parameters at a MS is typically a resource intensive (battery, processing power, etc.) activity as it is frequently performed at the MS. Performing this activity for a long neighbour list as provided by serving BS may impact operations and performance of the MS. Furthermore, maintaining a MS specific neighbor list with multiple entries for each neighbor list at the serving BS may also be time and resource intensive at the serving BS and may impact operations and performance of the BS in a negative way, when a large number of UEs are connected to the BS/eNB.